by T. Braddy
“The ghosts of my former life don’t want to let me go, not the other way around.”
“Do you always talk in metaphors?”
If you only knew how un-metaphorical it all was, I thought.
Yaelis said, “He reads. Never seen him pick up a book, but he’s always throwing out philosophical, deep stuff. I think he discovered Wikipedia when he got this fancy new phone of his, and that’s where he gets it from.”
I said, “I can google ‘how to look smart’ as quick as you can roll your eyes, my girl.”
Allison punched me on the shoulder. “It’s true. Sometimes you talk like you’re being chased by literal ghosts, like that one movie – what’s it called?”
“Pet Sematary?” Yaelis said.
“She’s discovered Stephen King,” her dad said. “Everything is now somehow a work of his.”
“No, she might be right,” Allison said. “I don’t remember the exact movie, but it had to do with a dude who couldn’t get away from all the people he’d let down.”
I leaned back in my chair, tried to dig on the B.B., and then caught sight of something. Looked like my old buddy from the bar, the one with the neck tattoo. The one, I suspected, wanted me dead.
“That’s every movie,” I said, even though she had hit, if not home, then at least home-adjacent. “And lingering on the morbid side of things keep me sharp. I was nearly killed a few nights ago, if you’ll remember, friends.”
Allison slid her arms around mine and squeezed, leaning in to place her head on my shoulder. It felt about right. “Something tells me you’re hard to kill.” She’d tried to make it sound jokey, like a jest, but it came out even more morose than she intended.
“It’s because I’ve already died. Somebody put me six feet down in an Indian burial ground, and so I can’t be killed. Again.”
Y’s eyes lit up. She slurped ginger ale from her straw and then said, “Pet Sematary, definitely.”
“Definitely,” I said.
Y said, “I took my pet alligator up there, and he came back a crocodile.”
I think she thought she was making a joke of some kind, because she could barely get the words out for the way she was cracking up. She broke into a fit of laughter, trying not to let ginger ale squirt from her nose.
Winston smiled and rolled his eyes. “Officer, I know she looks drunk, but I swear it was the ginger ale that got her,” he said.
“Hey!” Yaelis swatted his arm. “I’m your only daughter. Your job is to be enthralled by my precocious behavior.”
I attempted to make surreptitious glances toward the bar. A few people cleared away, revealing some dapper but not dangerous blues fans. My man, if he had been here, was most certainly gone.
“Precocious is for five year olds,” Winston said, grin widening. He affected a Bible-thumping preacher’s voice. “What sort monster is it that I’ve reared? What. Hath. I. Wrought?”
The whole table burst into laughter. All but me.
I couldn’t quite muster the appropriate response. My mind had been commandeered by the scene to my right. I checked every face, every tattoo. The face I had constructed in my mind changed, shifted into an approximation of every face at the bar. Now I couldn’t quite picture the man from the bar.
Allison leaned forward at the table and said, “Yaelis, keep up the good work. Men are intimidated by women who can hold their own in conversation, and I think you’re going to make a whole lot of men nervous.”
“Not anytime soon, I hope,” Winston said, looking at his daughter as if he’d never contemplated the idea before.
A pair of sharks in tattered linen suits shuffled past, holding their drinks aloft to avoid a coterie of middle-aged women, and I lost visual of both the guy and the tattoo.
“Headed to the bathroom,” I said, and I was up, shouldering through the crowd.
“You all right, Rol?” Winston asked, though his voice already sounded distant. “You look–”
But I had already elbowed my way across two tables. I looked back once and saw Allison standing next to her chair, staring into me. I waved her off and sidled up to the bar, peering in both directions in alternating glances as discreetly as possible.
“See a guy with a tattoo get up and leave?” I asked the bartender when he approached.
“Lots of guys with tattoos, man. What you want to drink?”
“On his neck. This guy’s got one on his neck.”
Barkeep hefted a bottle of vodka and simultaneously sprayed club soda into a glass full of ice. “Maybe. Shit. I don’t pay attention to tattoos on dudes.”
Out of my wallet came a twenty. “This help any with your memory?”
Squirt of lime. Twirl of the swizzle stick. One glance at the twenty. “I got no use for that. Hundred, maybe. But I make that in a half-hour.”
Goddamnit. “Send that table refills on ginger ale,” I said, and the guy smirked into his next concoction, a Beam and Coke, extra Beam.
I left the asshole there, slipped into the crowd and out the back door. That it happened to be in the vicinity of the bathroom was a godsend. Maybe it’d stave off some of the jitters I’d no doubt left the table with.
Out in the alley, I made my way past two kitchen workers in white smocks sucking furiously at their cigarettes and slipped quietly onto the street. A couple of cars sat in wait at a stop sign down the way, but the red embers of their tail lights darkened as they pulled away, the rear car ignoring the sign altogether.
Tires barked somewhere a block over, and a vibrating trunk oozed bass nearby. The kids in the smocks giggled over a private joke, and one kicked the dumpster, causing them to break into another fit of hysterical laughter. Above their jittery Spanish, I thought I heard rustling of some indeterminate origin off the main road.
Nothing particular jumped out, and I figured my tormentor had too much sense to go fence-hopping over in this neighborhood, but I couldn’t help myself. I went into to an automatic daze beset on all sides by curiosity, and followed it to what I hoped was a logical end, maybe a showdown with my newfound monster.
A spark of that particular gift of mine swelled out of the cracks in the sidewalk, or drifted to me from a nearby cemetery, but only in small, garbled snatches of sound in neural kinetics. The equivalent of whispered prayers in the night. Something evil had transpired here at some point in history – perhaps a multitude of evil events – but I didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to indulge the other side of the dividing line between life and death.
Instead, I trailed the sound of nearby rustling, some ways down the street.
I’m not crazy, I thought. There’s something down the street.
My visions sometimes exposed me as a kind of bizarre public figure, especially if I found myself stopping and staring in broad daylight, but this wasn’t one of my less sane moments. Those would come later, I was certain.
In the distance, I swore a man was lurching furtively among a line of cars perched against a broken curb. Lights were few and far between, and the darkness covered the trees and road like ink poured on a bad photograph. In my head, panicked thoughts fought to squelch the susurrating of the dead against the ephemeral darkness.
I got so caught up in trying to spot the dude that I didn’t hear the soft patter of feet on pavement. I surreptitiously spun and spied a figure trailing me. A man in front of me and a man behind me. I hopped an adjacent fence and ducked down among the bushes of someone’s backyard. No pistol. No knife. I grabbed a splintered chunk of wood from a rotten pile next to me. I had come unprepared, but if this was the time to work, then far be it from me to procrastinate.
Each yard was laid out in contiguous squares, the houses stretched across the lots and pushed beyond fences toward the street. I’d need to go through houses to escape. It was back out to the street if I wanted to do anything at all.
So I waited there, squatting on my haunches. Clutching my temporary weapon, both hoping and dreading that I’d have to use it.
As the f
igure ducked under a low-hanging tree, I moved. Back over the fence and raising the wood. I prepared to bring it down in a crushing swipe but saw that it wasn’t a tattooed thug but an older black guy in a button-down shirt and suspenders, topped off with a tattered porkpie hat.
My voice came out in a coarse rasp. “Hey, man, did you see a brutal-looking dude come by here? Maybe looked like he wanted to kill somebody who looks a lot like me?”
“Seen nobody but you,” said the man, straightening his collar as he passed.
I sped up to catch him and experienced a shock that put me momentarily on my knees. My vision blurred as my eyes became flush with tears, but I struggled to see what the hell had hit me emotionally in such a way.
Then realization struck me: the man with the porkpie hat was moving but not necessarily walking. Where his feet should have been was nothing but a hazy blank space, his black slacks ending in a blur below the knees. He wasn’t cold and he wasn’t trying to get home after a night of barbecue and the blues. He was dead, or at least in the proximity of that distinction, and appeared to be encircled by a semi-dark chrysalis, or a bubble of some kind, hanging around him. An impossible thing to see, unless you got up close on him, but I guess that went for the man himself, too.
As he passed, I heard the stark, jangly sound of a guitar. A spot-on version of “I Got to Cross De River O’ Jordan.”
I got up, shuffled sideways for a few steps, and watched him make his way down the road. I followed – at a distance. The wood plank dangled harmlessly at my side.
The night had grown cold, and streetlamps threw pallid yellow streaks across the wet roads. Shadows peppered the landscape, seemingly growing out of the ground and slowly overtaking the surrounding world. It was a night for vague apparitions of a time long gone to straggle along the side of the road. Most people couldn’t see them, and those who, like me, were fortunate enough to be fortunate enough to be afflicted with this curse, probably thought them to be drunks looking for someplace to sleep off a fifth of gin.
I’d never really thought about it: how many other people like me did exist? No time. Not now. It’d have to be a problem for future Rolson to contend with.
It occurred to me, as if for the first time, that I should abandon the mission of tailing this spirit and turn back. Maybe give the tattooed gentleman a run for his money. Find a pistol and shoot the guy in his temple. Or maybe head back to the club, forget I ever saw this. Some force well beyond my control continued to drag me forward, however, so I allowed myself to be pulled in by this otherworldly tractor beam.
Ahead of me, the spectral figure slunk off the main road onto a darkened path, overgrown by trees of an ancient variety and so pitch black that I couldn’t see where it was headed. Slide guitar accompanied the figure into the nothingness. It echoed through the trees and settled somewhere in my head.
Just a minute, I thought. I just need a minute to–
To what? To follow this apparition to the swamp and disappear, maybe forever? To see where it ends up taking me? What madness was driving me forward?
The back of my head warmed up, sending bright, twinkling lights swarming into view. It was as though burning hot medicine had been injected into the base of my brain, and it opened up my field of vision.
An odor redolent of flowers had me thinking of my erstwhile compadres. Allison and the rest probably had no idea what in the hell was going on, but even that thought didn’t turn me around. I felt like I had to see this thing through. Once, I did turn and look, but the world behind me had dissipated into a kind of grim, brown furrow.
The night itself was murmuring, the swell of bugs unseen and voices muttering in the emptiness that was enveloping me. It was the voice of grief out here, the whole accumulation of death concentrate seeping out of the pores of the earth. I wandered the lonely hills of the dead, and found myself lost between worlds.
And yet I continued. I ambled through the thick blackness, feeling a change come over me. I couldn’t quite explain it, but it was as definite and real as the sounds inside my head. My stomach lit up and simmered unhappily, the fire creeping up my esophagus to my mouth and brain. Time seemed to come to a halt.
Eventually, I came to a dirty, crumbling break in the darkness, which gave way to to a scene I had become disturbingly familiar with: a party out of time. A celebration outside of existence.
People sashayed around, dancing to music I didn’t hear. They poured out of a small, squat building that seemed to lean sideways. Men in decadent suits leaned against nonexistent walls. Hats tilted back on heads dripping with sweat. Men of a previous age. The women wore flowers in their hair. They danced with the men, danced with one another, and the sweat was the commonality between them. If it were hot, I didn’t feel it.
I headed out front, ignoring my instinct to avoid the dancing throngs, and found the object of this capricious little trip.
A man sat in the middle of a clearing. Leaning against a rock, hands folded over the absent crackling of a small fire. The area around him was bare, unadorned by the normal trappings I had come to expect from wooded areas.
He wasn’t the same older man I’d followed to cracked open into this supernatural split in the fabric of the world, but maybe this guy was merely a younger version.
He was a youngish African-American man, dressed in a suit, tie, and one of those newsboy hats I imagined were popular back during the great depression.
“Evening,” he said. His voice was smooth yet sonorous, and even though his lips barely moved, each syllable vibrated in my chest.
“Evening,” I replied.
His eyes were open in a half-lidded expression familiar to anyone who recognized him. His head leaned to one side as he adjusted the tuning knobs on his guitar. Listening for just the right pitch. He picked, picked, picked on the low E string until it was just right, and then his attention returned to me.
“You listen to the blues?” he asked.
“You could say that,” I said. “Not like this.”
“It ain’t a wonder to you that I’m saying anything at all?”
I leaned back against what I hoped was a giant rock. “Not much surprises me these days.”
“Me either. Been a long time since I got put on the spot. Spend enough time on this rock, you get used to just about everything.”
Behind him, the backup dancers for this hallucination flailed from side to side, arms and legs akimbo in a libidinous tableau. Looking even slightly away from them caused the scene to meld into a single hellish image.
The bluesman’s face flashed, and I caught the sight of something grim underneath. It was not the youngish blind man sitting here, a twelve string guitar propped against him, but a ragged, bony representation of a man. A talking skeleton, a mass of gore and dirt held together by cockroaches and maggots.
The corner of his mouth twitched in the faint ghost of a smile.
“You saw that, huh?”
“I’m surprised I didn’t see it sooner. Most of the dead men I encounter look like they made a wrong turn at central casting for a George Romero movie.”
He smiled. “I don’t have any idea what that is.”
“Zombies.”
“Ahh, I know what those are. Wrote a song in a graveyard in Louisiana, and I think I saw one there. It was just after midnight, and I put my eyes on this pale figure shuffling among the tombstones.”
I said, “But you’re blind.”
His smile widened. “I didn’t have to catch him with these things,” he said, tapping the side of his head with one calloused finger. “It was with something deep down inside I saw that man. Maybe his soul, condemned to wander the earth.”
“Do you see me the same way?” I asked.
“You’ve got a purpose,” he said. “Not to wander, but to fix some things.”
“All I think I do is break whatever I touch.”
He smiled, but there were no teeth behind his lips. Just the background of this little scene. I think I saw some hip bones mo
ving in concert. “You tune a guitar, and sometimes a string pops. That’s just the way of it. But what I’m saying is, look. Look around you.”
I did.
“What do you see?”
“Dead people walking around like there’s nothing strange at all about it.”
He finger strummed a minor chord. “What else?”
“Darkness.”
“You got it, sport. There’s darkness. It’s all around you. Maybe it don’t touch you yet, and maybe it do, just a little bit. But it’s coming for you, and you got to figure out how to fend it off.”
“How do I do that?”
“Choose the right path. There’s a way that seems right to man, but the end of that road is death. If you go on the way you’re headed, it’s a very black end for you.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? I end up like the rest of you, wandering a plane of existence between two worlds for all eternity?”
Another strum of the guitar. This one was a more complete blues riff. Sounded like slide guitar, but he had no glass on his finger. “Robert wasn’t shittin’ nobody when he talked about that Hellhound. You go on and break Hell wide open, my man, and your existence – if that’s what you want to call it – is gonna be miserable.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” I said.
“You got a reckoning coming,” he said. “It ain’t gonna be your choice, but it’s the way things are going to happen.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can see beyond what eyes are good for,” he said. “I reckon that’s the wages of having spent most of m’life without right good vision, in the traditional sense. I see things, my man, and what I see for you ain’t good. It’s Hell on the Riverside for you.”
“And how is it that I can stay on the right side of it all?”
He took his time on that one. His fingers moved deftly around those lower frets, and what emerged from the soundhole seemed to convey the man’s message more comprehensively than any set of words could possibly hope to do.
